The core book John Cassidy's Capitalism and Its Critics: A History From The Industrial Revolution To AI provides a kaleidoscopic history of global capitalism. Cassidy, a staff writer at The New Yorker tells the story through the eyes of the critics from the English Luddites who rebelled against early factory automation to communists in the early twentieth century, the international Wages for Housework campaign of the 1970s, and the modern degrowth movement. It visits familiar names―Smith, Marx, Luxemburg, Keynes, Polanyi, Stiglitz, and Piketty-but also less familiar figures, including William Thompson, the Irish proto-socialist; Flora Tristan, the French proponent of a universal labor union; John Hobson, the original theorist of imperialism; Eric Williams, the Trinidadian author of a famous thesis on slavery and capitalism; Joan Robinson, the Cambridge economist and critic of the Cold War; and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, the founding father of degrowth. Blending rich biography, panoramic history, and lively exploration of economic theories, Capitalism and Its Critics illuminates the deep roots of many of the most urgent issues of our time.

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